While Solid Air is his most beloved album, Martyn didn’t care for it, thinking it was too rushed, its patchwork nature betraying a lack of commitment. Later in 1973, Martyn committed hard to his musical vision. That year’s Inside Out liquefied his psychic schism into lava and ocean spray, Martyn’s words warbled to the point of unintelligibility. Inside Out is where he fully cuts the line to his folk barge roots, deserting songwriting grounded in specificity for improvisation crudely cut and reassembled in the studio. A cult audiophile treasure, and Martyn’s personal favorite, it was a huge commercial failure.
For a long time, if Solid Air was a touchstone for future musicians, it was a surreptitious one, a whispered classic among the most dedicated of crate diggers. But in the early ’90s, during a stint in Chicago, Martyn was exposed to hip-hop—and through his second son, Spenser—drum n’ bass, acid house, and jungle, which he incorporated into his own recordings. When he went back to the UK, Martyn signed with Go! Discs, the same label as Portishead. After Go! cofounder Andy Macdonald sold it to Polygram, he established Independiente and brought Martyn with him—this time marketed as “the godfather of trip-hop.” Martyn covered Portishead’s “Glory Box” on 1998’s The Church With One Bell, and by the start of the 2000s, Solid Air was being reassessed as a precursor to the spliff-loaded sensibilities of the recombinant pop of the late ’90s. Beth Orton, whose own work would merge folk music with electronic ornamentation, glowingly referred to Solid Air as “one of the first ambient records I ever heard.” “Solid Air” was even included on a 2000 Q magazine compilation CD called Essential Chill Out.
And in November 1999, Martyn’s past reemerged in another random way. A Volkswagen TV commercial aired widely, with a car full of attractive Gen X-ers wordlessly driving a drop-top Cabriolet through the idyllic nighttime hills of Northern California. It was scored to “Pink Moon,” posthumously bringing Nick Drake into contact with the tasteful and adoring audience that eluded him in his lifetime. Toward the end of his own life, Martyn loathed fielding questions about Drake, and called the hipster worship of his late friend “creepy” and “ghoulish.” Perhaps it was borne from guilt: A month before Drake’s suicide, he and Martyn had a vicious argument that was never sorted out. When John got the call that Drake had died in November 1974, he laughed—a “disturbing” laugh—and casually told Beverley, “He did it.” Then he walked out of the room and disappeared for two days.
Symbolically, Martyn left that room forever. If Solid Air exists at the crossroads of a battle between his quietly paternal and belligerently hedonistic sides, the rest of his life would err toward the latter: alcoholism, drug abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, divorce, and poor health. For the remainder of the ’70s, as his vices ballooned and his mental health declined, Martyn’s imagination persisted. His seven-album run on Island, from Bless the Weather to 1980’s Grace and Danger, is phenomenal, each LP as unique an auditory subversion of the singer-songwriter movement as anything by Tim Buckley or Joni Mitchell. But it’s Solid Air that exemplifies Martyn’s artistry, a preoccupation with the in-between, as he told The Telegraph in 2006: “There’s a space between words and music and my voice lives right there.”
